


stranger, stranger, do i know you from somewhere?

by QuenchiestCactusJuice99



Series: no longer what was (just what is) [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (or.... at all elaborated on), Guilt, Hakodad is feeling guilty, Sokka comes from a Much Worse future than canon, Time Travel, don’t worry about it tho, he thinks Sokka changing so much is bc he left, its not super elaborated on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:09:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21529588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuenchiestCactusJuice99/pseuds/QuenchiestCactusJuice99
Summary: Hakoda reunites with his children. Katara is upset, as she has every right to be (and she looks so much like Kaya now) but Sokka is... quiet.More different than Hakoda would like to admit. A little like he wasn’t even the same person anymore. But Katara didn’t seem perturbed by it - so that meant this was just... Sokka. Had been Sokka, for long enough it was normal.(He left. He knows he doesn’t get to judge.)
Series: no longer what was (just what is) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1720906
Comments: 23
Kudos: 315





	stranger, stranger, do i know you from somewhere?

**Author's Note:**

> Distraction ahoy! ........ again. Please enjoy what I believe to be the re-immersion of myself in the atla fandom. If for some reason people like this enough, I might make it into a series!

Sokka has... changed.

Not that Hakoda thought he wouldn’t, in two years - not that he thought he’d come home to the same exact little boy and girl he’d left.

Sokka sounds older. Not his voice - though that has deepened, strengthened too - but the way he talks, the words he speaks and the thought behind them.

Hakoda has no right, he knows, to feel like his son has grown up too fast. He was the one that had left Sokka and Katara in the first place - had left Sokka in charge of the entire tribe when he was _fourteen_ \- and he’d done it because he could not spare a single man to stay and help.

There is a myriad of emotions in Sokka’s eyes when he looks at Hakoda. Like a rippling reflection, always moving, always changing.

“What happened?” Hakoda asks, and he’s not sure if he’s prepared to hear the answer. Some part of him wants Sokka to say _you left us behind,_ but that is something Katara would probably say, is probably thinking.

Sokka gives him a crooked little smirk and not the goofy grin he’d always sported just two years ago, and he rubs the back of his head.

“I had to do something,” and he says it to Hakoda like an apology. Like those were not the very feelings that made Hakoda sail away from him two years ago, the very feelings that took Hakoda away from his children - _I have to do something._

Sokka’s eyes are different, too. They are the same blue as Hakoda’s, the same color they’ve always been - but Sokka’s eyes, now, are... tired. Glassy, a little, like he’s been running on too little for too long.

Sokka’s eyes are steady, too, and they peer out of his son’s face in a way that makes Hakoda feel like he’s looking at a stranger.

“I missed you,” Hakoda says, and for an instant that stranger is more prominent than ever. For an instant, Hakoda wants this boy he no longer recognizes to hate him.

Wants to hear him say _but you still left._

And then shadows Hakoda hadn’t even registered clear from Sokka’s face, tired lines giving way to smile ones, and that stranger, just for that single moment, disappears. “I missed you too, dad.” Sokka’s voice breaks and Hakoda drags him into a hug and Sokka lets him.

The stranger will come back when the moment is over, Hakoda knows, and it makes his heart heavy but he knows he doesn’t really get a say.

Because he did leave.

But just for this moment, Hakoda can pretend it is his fourteen year old son not-grown-too-quickly in his arms, and that he has not left, and that everything is how it was, once.

Just for this moment.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading even when you accidentally clicked my story, because who would read a story of mine on *purpose*? Smh anyway, if you managed to suffer all the way through, feel free to leave a comment, tell me what you think!


End file.
